101 Super Success Secrets

By

Bill Cottringer

   Personal success is usually found on the road less traveled, but the secrets are not new to be found, but rather older ones to be remembered from before words hid them away from our conscious awareness. The following 101 super success secrets are some of the best kept clues from the common road less traveled.

1.       The greatest success is what survives a series of painful failures, if there is enough patience and tenacity to keep trying and not give up. Often, success is just around the next corner you are most tempted to give up on getting to. After all, it is the surprise of success we are after, not the actual success itself because of what we usually must give up during the quest for it.

2.       You shouldn’t try to avoid or run from failures but rather study them more closely, because important clues on learning what you need to know about being successful are usually well-hidden in the failures. In that ironic spirit, failures are not something to avidly avoid but rather awesome situations to embrace enthusiastically.

3.       Being successful involves hard work and much creativity and there really are no shortcuts; but sustaining success over the long haul, is the most difficult challenge of all, even more than bouncing back from failure.

4.       Success is something you can learn to attract, but first you must become more aware of how you are inadvertently un-attracting it, freeing its path to you.

5.       The degree of success you are destined to achieve is greatly affected by the amount and quality of free will you are willing to exert. And, the best use of free will is in the choices you are about to make right now, rather than trying to correct wrong ones made in the past or thinking about the choices you may have to make in the future.

6.       The amount of success you get to enjoy in life is often determined by how you define it. When you rely on using external criteria, it belongs to others; but when you use your own internal thermometer, it belongs to you.

7.       Success involves finding the best version of the truth and the perspective in time and place from where you are doing the looking which determines what you find. And if you don’t like what you find, then all you have to do is move. That is the best equal opportunity life gives us.

8.       Success is usually a result of creativity and creativity is always accessed best by opening your mind and changing a truth-shaping paradigm from which you are looking at what you see. Looking past what you see can literally change everything for everybody.

9.       You don’t usually become aware of being successful until your feet are three-fourths the way there. Only then does it begin to seem obvious.

10.   The tipping point of success is when you shift your attention from your rear-view mirror to the front view in knowing there is much more to see and learn ahead than behind.

11.   Genuine, long-lasting success begins when you finally understand how to reconcile apparent opposites into the whole truth, which is something you finally learn how to accept out of frustration, but only after much futile searching with empty hands. Escaping from the duality of the human mind, dividing everything into this and not that or that and not this, is like trying to have your own teeth bite themselves.

12.   In anything, timing is everything, especially with success, but it is not easy to get right without a lot of trial and error.

13.   Success is often a side effect of better time management and better time management starts with self-management, especially taking the driver’s seat in seeing time as your most valuable resource to be used wisely. The wisest use of your time is to spend less of it trying to remember the past or predict the future, and more of it living in the now moment, which is really all there is anyway.

14.   Successful time management starts with viewing it as something that isn’t mechanical with moments of starting and finishing, but rather fluid and always available, forever if need be.

15.   One of the most formidable obstacles to success is the illusion that we are separate from what we are trying to do and not already united with it. Success always involves ignoring this sense of separation and then merging with what you are trying to do.

16.   The pure awesome wonder of truth and success may alone be the journey and the destination at once. Wondering alone is wonderful enough just like if you are lucky enough to live on the water with a spectacular view, you are lucky enough, knowing that “water” and the “view” are very relative to each person’s preferences.

17.   Success often appears to happen both gradually and overnight. Some call it luck, which is when your efforts find the right timing to casually bump into a marvelous success opportunity.

18.   An important thing to do on your way to success is to start noticing what you have been failing to notice all along. We all have serious blind spots. Other people are usually in a better position to see and comment upon these blind spots of ours, but the comments usually get lost in the blind spots. Nothing changes until we slow down and start noticing what we have been failing to notice all along, which is usually the last thing we notice.

19.   To a large extent, success involves becoming a master of interpersonal relations and communication. The best secret to better interpersonal relations is becoming likeable—positive, honest, a good listener, humorous, empathetic and agreeable; the best communication secret is to avoid defensive communication in not being judgmental, over-controlling, insensitive, manipulating, and over-certain.

20.   When you see truth as tentative, evolving and relative, you begin to see the few absolute truths there are because that is the nature of truth. Collecting the few absolute truths there are is an art and science.

21.   Success follows the rules of banking—you must make a deposit before getting to take a withdrawal and we all know life, like banks, is a very good record-keeper.

22.   Success involves slowing down and letting go to realize all you think you know may not be necessarily so and that what you do know is very tiny in comparison to all you don’t know. This is awesome wonder at its prime.

23.   There might not be any more you can do than commit to the sacred covenant of learning, growing and improving, moment by moment. Maybe everything else is incidental or irrelevant.

24.   Ego can get in the way of success, but the best you can do in checking your ego at the door, is to manage it rather than allowing it to manage you, just like time.

25.   It is best to deal with reality as it is head on as opposed to seeing it as you think it should be. The later perspective wastes valuable time in the success quest.

26.   Changing unpleasant realities, which you don’t like, sometimes merely requires a slight change in perception about that reality. Perceptions can be easily changed when you switch viewpoints. This is a valuable secret of great photographers.

27.   I fibbed earlier when I said there were no short cuts to success. There really are and these are called perturbation points (or just “P”: Points for short), where you employ a small intervention strategically placed in time and place and get BIG results. The trouble is that the path to these “P” Points is a very long and tiresome one full with winding side-roads and dead-ends, with no shortcuts.

28.   We all want to have our cake and eat it too, like being rich without having to work so hard or sacrifice so much. The trick in solving this paradox is to redefine the terms that are holding you back as a hostage, to rules you don’t have to accept as being true. This is the beginning of an open mind.

29.   Much of what holds us back from personal success is being convinced of the truth or our beliefs, after we form them from the realities we experience that conform to our expectations as being true, despite the facts that say otherwise. Getting rid of the destructive power that such beliefs hold over us, is a major challenge.

30.   At the end of the day and after all is said and done, all we really have is the faith that the source of what we believe to be true is accurate and complete itself. Much of life is validating and verifying our sources.

31.   Truth and beauty are what remain when nothing more can be subtracted or added.

32.   The more flexible you allow yourself to become, the better, period. Change is always the best test of progress in this regard.

33.   Assumptions are the termites of success and when you begin to question them, that is the beginning of turning a failure into a success, especially your own.

34.   You can never be genuinely happy until you find the purpose you were destined for and begin to use your free will to live that purpose. You usually don’t have to look very far though and may just have to ask the right questions: (a) What do others say I am good at? (b) what do I have most fun doing? (c) Is there something that is unpleasant or difficult for me to want to do, but knowing deep down I need to do?

35.   Success in getting a job in today’s tight market requires a shift from asking the question—What is in this for me as an employee? to What can I do for you as an employer to be successful? Self-centeredness, whether it is earned and deserved or not, will never get you hired, so it is best to keep it to yourself.

36.   Although being positive and optimistic may go against your experience and expectations, at least leaning that way is much better than the other direction, for the net results you will surely get.

37.   The real key to managing more equality in unfair situations is to provide a step ladder, not a free escalator or helicopter ride, which will never be fully appreciated and will always be open to abuse.

38.   There is no getting around Dolly Parton’s truth that you can’t have rainbows without both the rain and the sunshine. Besides, as Yogi Berra would have probably said, you need both to see the rainbow.

39.   Nature has all the most valuable success clues, if you just learn to be quiet and listen; the same is true with watching young children play. There are no illusions to hide the truth.

40.   Success with people comes from understanding both what we all have in common together, and also, what makes us unique as individuals. Paying attention to both, helps us understand others better, as well as ourselves.

41.   Success can be fueled and driven better by internal motivation you sense yourself rather than an external carrot given as reward by someone else. The sense you need to proceed is feeling confident you are making progress at your own speed.

42.   Comparing yourself with others never seems to work out as the most noticeable gains come about when you compare you to yourself. Worrying about what others get and have is useless because it can never help you on your success quest.

43.   Success puts three types of conflicts in our way—the conflicts of us vs. life, us vs. them, and us vs. us. Figuring successful solutions to these conflicts is what successful living is all about, again and again. And it is the stories that are told about these conflicts and surprise resolutions that give life its meaning and intrigue.

44.   Success requires solving problems effectively and effective problem-solving involves several things, including: Knowing what the problem is apart from its noisy symptoms; varying your approach until you find one that works; working backwards, upside-down and inside-out; realizing some problems are unsolvable and only manageable; changing languages of the problem; and sometimes just reapplying older solutions in newer and more unusual ways.

45.   A lot of success is knowing how and when to be resilient. Sometimes it is not so obvious or painful enough. It is important to know the few things to quit vs. the many to not quit.

46.   The truths that lead to success are usually obscure and not so easy to see. The obvious ones are even more difficult to see because they are so close. One of the main things to finally discover is that we are not really separate as a self from the rest of life. This is probably the first thing we learn and last that we unlearn.

47.   The first best rule of good communication is the translation of the carpenter’s rule: Listen twice and talk once. That is why we are given two ears and one mouth.

48.   The second rule is to never assume good communication has occurred and that you are being understood or you are understanding.  At least not with great effort to undue miscommunication and misunderstanding.

49.   And, the third rule is to know your audience well as to what they know and what they need to hear, without offending them or missing the mark. In other words, take the time to get to know your audience better. It can’t help but pay off.

50.   Painful conflicts are not to be avoided; the break-through to the other side—the gain, is always worth the pain, even if it takes more pain to see that.

51.   Real wealth is free. All you have to do is see truth and beauty in ordinary things in between spending money to not see these things.

52.   You really can’t manage the behavior of others in the direction you want. Heck, self management isn’t always possible.  But trying is.

53.   One important principle of success is understanding the power of Gestalt. The whole team of individual efforts and talent, collectively, is always more powerful than any of the individual members alone. Today, we should be worrying about computers doing more than we can, when we invented them.

54.   It is very helpful to learn how to distinguish between your noisy psychological conscience in your head and the whispering moral compass in your soul. One is usually grey with a lot of maybe’s, and the other in black and white with a simple yes or no.

55.   A very helpful habit on your way to success is to learn how to pose intriguing questions rather than thinking about clever answers to ordinary questions. Questioning other’s assumptions is a good start, but questioning your own, paves the way towards the littler successes on the way to the BIG one.

56.   There are important gaps to close on the path to success; a few of these include the gap between what you know and what you don’t know; between what you say and what they hear; between what you are trying to do and how you are trying to do it; and between what you expect and what you get. You can’t close gaps in your head, only with your hands. Just like you can’t talk your way out of bad behavior you behaved yourself into.

57.   An important aspect of conflict resolution is to know who has the most invested in a particular outcome. That can determine whether to back off or continue to push forward, so one person must win at the other’s expense of losing. This is called a cooperative, win-win mentality and is very useful in life as opposed to the more traditional competitive model of win-lose.

58.   A very useful communication skill is knowing when to say nothing. Sometime your unspoken right can change a wrong with the least amount of effort. This is where silence is golden so to speak.

59.   If you are going to spend some time criticizing someone, then spend a little more showing them what they may have done wrong and how to correct that failure into a success.

60.   The most important time to remain positive is in the midst of adversity which is trying to teach you an important character lesson which you can’t learn being negative and not listening.

61.   There are no results without diligent and consistent follow-up and follow-through. It is often the last rock you look under that hides the results you are seeking. Keep going until you find what you are looking for and then be prepared to keep looking, with pauses now and then to enjoy what you found.

62.   A point to become sensitive to is the point of no return. Seeing it before it comes and goes is a useful skill to develop.  To avoid anger or lost opportunities, like below.

63.   Abraham Lincoln said we get two chances at taking advantage of the good things coming our way. So, it is a good idea to recognize when the first has come and gone, waiting vigilantly for the second one.

64.   No decisions can be made with the perfect amount of information. The trick is to know when you have enough without wasting time looking for the irrelevant, unnecessary or useless.

65.   The reason it is virtually impossible to argue religion or politics successfully, is that we haven’t yet invented a language that can do so. All basic truth is not speak-able because there is always too much space in between the words we use to represent the truths we think we know in the same words that tell us so. Funny thing though, we are all trying to say the same thing.

66.   The best secret to success is the hardest one to learn—balance. We know the best perspective is always in the center when you can see everywhere, but we sure do a lot of wondering and wandering about this on our way to get here. The earlier the better, but better late than never.

67.   Sometimes success is knowing the difference of what you can control and what you can’t. But what you can’t control is often manageable. Doing that, you are better able to control the few things you need to.

68.   There are some important “yes-buts” to be aware of. Just a few are:  YES, happiness is the most common pursuit for us all, BUT that is where the commonness of happiness ends because we all define and experience it in our own personal ways that are not easy to communicate to ourselves let alone others; YES, most things are easier said than done, BUT that statement itself is much easier said than undone and not always true, and accepting that reality is easier done than unsaid, and YES, you have to experience both happiness and unhappiness—usually in their most painful or joyful extremes—before you know the real difference, BUT that is an unavoidable painful process that is hard to understand, have patience with and accept, especially when you are going through it. But, so what?

69.   Relationships are the best opportunity for both partners to get more success together than each can get alone. One such opportunity is to develop better character through the disturbing conflicts that occur. Keeping this purpose in mind is often what keeps a relationship alive and well and not letting it slip into mediocrity. After all, what doesn’t kill you just makes you stronger.

70.   Successful parenting is often anticipating the values your kids may need most to succeed and then having the courage to live them, consistently, for your children to see and learn from, in spite of the dangling participle.

71.   Seeing a conflict as a moment of danger vs. opportunity gives you more chances for success than you may have thought about. The more the better, right?

72.   It seems as though even good relationships often regress into partners paying more attention to the annoying differences rather than the pleasing similarities that brought them together. This is an example of how too much familiarity can breed contempt. This is something just to be aware of and catch before it comes and goes uncaught.

73.   Sometimes we miss the whole point of something because we fail to pause and look closely at the purpose of it. The main purpose of a conflict is to provoke us into taking advantage of a growth opportunity that main be painful in the short run but beneficial over the long haul, despite all the bruises, bleeding and broken bones along the way.

74.   There are three main types of relationships that occur. The first is a short one that is often painful, where the two people try to warn each other of a fault. The second one is even more painful when both people become aware of the fault. The third one is the reward you get for changing the fault.

75.   Perhaps it is the surprise of success that is most rewarding and many failures are just delays due to the boredom of waiting for what you know is eventually coming. This can explain most bizarre behavior.

76.   Very few of us are in sync with another person in time and place with our personal development learning, growing and improving efforts. The bigger the gap between two people, the worse the conflicts are and the less developed the resolution skills are. Therefore, it makes more sense choosing a person to spend the most time with, where the gap isn’t quite so wide.

77.   Here is an important reality to consider: We all have an insatiable drive to explain things and understand them. This often leads to over-embracing an over-simplified, artificial understanding too far removed from reality to act on. Noticing this common fault can get you back on a better path to the surprise of success.

78.   Knowing that we usually over-estimate what we can get done in an hour and underestimate what results a week will yield us, is a smart way to get more by doing less.

79.   Understanding how certain illusions limit our potential success is a major open door to success. Some of these illusions are our perceived separation from the rest of life, sense of self, notion of time, need for free will to determine our destiny, and view of creation with a beginning and ending. Managing these illusions is much better than them managing us.

80.   I don’t think we will ever truly understand the relationship between thinking, feeling and behaving. That is a mystery to just wonder about and not solve. And, that conclusion just adds more fun surprise to the surprise of success.

81.   It can be great fun taking things apart in life, but even more fun putting them back together to work better than they did when we came upon them. This is a very noble mission that may rise above all others, because it requires us to resolve the most difficult human challenge—to be free enough to love unconditionally in return for the love life has freely given us without demanding anything in return.

82.   Critical thinking is always a part of the road less traveled to success. Just a few secrets of critical thinking to build on are to ask good questions, especially about fundamental assumptions; be positive; dig below the surface; rethink what you already know; separate feelings from thinking; converse with the “enemy”; keep an open mind; share suspicions; and never take your position too seriously.

83.   Probably the most valuable mental activity we can do, which may be the closest thing to a legitimate shortcut to discover success, is to collect principles about the way life and people work. But then, the hard work is just beginning because you have to use your creativity to figure out how to translate these abstract principles into everyday language and then apply them in your life to get the results you are seeking. That shortcut is another part of the road less traveled.

84.   There is one practical assumption worth making and this is that miscommunication is more prevalent than good communication. The “Tower of Babble” is alive and well and needs to be toppled, because the truth be known, it is hiding most of the best success secrets. Working to clarify miscommunication is indeed a noble pursuit, although much more difficult than we imagine. Music, art, photography, poetry, literature and the other creative arts may have some secrets about getting around the main obstacle to better communication—the language with which we use to communicate. Dare to become both an artist and scientist in communicating.

85.   There are two main levels of success—surviving and thriving. Just surviving is very difficult these days as the competition against others is so keen, but the real success test just begins when you start competing against yourself to try and thrive into your own best prosperity zone by being your best self in living a good life. This is where all the real rewards reside.

86.   How you define something like success, always has great deal of influence over how much or how little of it you have. This is especially true about the important clue of creativity. If you define it traditionally, as aligned with the creative arts, you probably won’t have as much of it to use in your pursuit of success, as when you look for more unconventional definitions. Two unconventional definitions of creativity worth considering are finding new and unusual ways of using ordinary things, and adding a small element to something that is already unique to make it slightly more unique.

87.   There are four criteria that we can judge the quality of any creative product against. These are questions we can ask: (a) How unique and different is it from all the other things already out there? (b) How difficult was it to make, shape and produce into a product? (c) Is it technically sound within the format it is being presented? (d) Does it clearly and effectively communicate a common problem in life with a usable solution?

88.   If there is one single success prescription it is this one: (a) Dream huge (b) Be clever (c) Work hard. As simple as this is, it is more than enough to keep you occupied for several life-times.

89.   One of the most challenging aspects of interpersonal relations is trying to change faulty perceptions others have of you. That is why you usually don’t get a second chance at making a good impression at first. And the rest of your life is becoming the person you have just been pretending to be all along.

90.   If you view the sole purpose of life as being playful and fun, living has just begun. Kids are born with that profound wisdom but we adults have forgotten it along our journey to find the meaning and wholeness we think we don’t already have. Words are responsible for the forgetting.

91.   One very common but unproductive habit we all have is not establishing the right priorities in our living. The main priority that leads to success is to know the values you hold most dearly and build your life around them, avoiding the rest any time you can.

92.   If you are not totally engaged in passionately losing yourself into what you are doing, you probably aren’t doing what you should be doing.

93.   Success has a lot to do with common sense not being so “common” these days. Mark Twain gave a definition of common sense that is worth considering. He said, “Common sense is the simple knack of seeing something the way it is and doing something the way it should be done.” Anything else is not common sense.

94.   The inevitable adversities we all go through in life are just opportunities to rid ourselves of the reputation shadow of our true character, made when the sun is out.

95.   Choosing to intervene in most problems in life rarely corrects them and just delays their Karma consequences, but choosing to not intervene in the few things that bring tears to God’s eyes will always make those problems worse. There are always some choices we don’t want to not make as it is not the things in life that happen which bother us, but rather our opinions about those things. Although opinions often prompt choices they can also dissuade certain choices.

96.   A useful and worthwhile simplification can be applied to our emotions, dividing them into positive or negative ones. The positive emotions we feel are there to tell us we are headed in the right direction, while the negative ones just happen to let us know we may want to reconsider changing our approach to something. possibly heading us in the wrong direction.

97.   It is a good idea to never take most of life too seriously, because in the end you won’t get out of it alive, at least in the sense you think.

98.   Taking the time to understand the most amusing things in life comes before the ability to understand the serious things, but we often mistakenly reverse the sequence of that effort, like many other things.

99.   People who are optimistic are happier, live longer, have better marriages and make more money than their counterparts who are more realistic or worse yet, pessimistic. That is enough proof for me.

100.   We usually start out reacting to the things that happen to us in life. But this is during the surviving                half of success. The start of thriving comes when we become proactive and doing things that prevent the need for reactions.

101 . Becoming successful carries obligations, the main ones involve: (a) finding less successful people to  mentor and (b) generously giving back your own hard-found success secrets to others when they need them most.